My Warid rant

I’m the real target consumer. I don’t watch television, travel within limited distances, I don’t read magazines unless someone pushes one in front of my face. But I am not yet thirty; I possess capital. Reach me and you’ve got revenue gold.

So let’s have a quick look, find out what the big spenders have been doing to get my money. Nothing, huh? Well why the fuck not!

Warid’s a lost case. I know of so many people who want to make the switch to Warid but aren’t doing so simply because they don’t know what Warid is offering. Our Mid-east mavens waited a whole fucking day to see whether their much-vaunted N-gen network and technology based strategy would work (remember how that’s all Warid execs would talk about in the months prior to launch?), and then jumped right into counting paisas. Trout and Ries should reunite into a suicide pact just so they can die and spin in their graves for this. And what counting paisas—do they not realize that 25 paisas for 15 seconds adds up to 1 taka per minute, which is a significantly more powerful proposition to own?

But why are they even going into price-based warfare (without in fact having the lowest priced package)? Word on the street says that Warid launched because they had to. Understandable, so did Hitler invade Poland. When you launch “because you have to” (flashback to the FM wars of 2006), you are expected to build your resources. Cover the whole country first, offer an unlimited data package, tell people about your wonderful post-paid package, something.

I’ll break out branding theory because the Bangladeshi telco squabbles have proven that the strongest brand wins. Banglalink owns the cheap call rates position. They’ve been trying to get into GrameenPhone’s “who else can love our country like we do” arena but people still lovingly know them as the cheap option. Aktel, which will suck your dick and sleep with your aged father for his second pulse, is the cheapest. They’re known as nothing really, except for their short-term gains of Joy, Power, Foorti, etc. They’re the “red and blue brand”.

Enter Warid, red and blue like Aktel, trying to own cheapness like Banglalink, and with Bangladeshiness-exploiting advertising like GrameenPhone. (Way to go Pakistan!) What do they do to distinguish themselves as a newcomer in a price-war-ridden telecom market?

Communicate call rates only! (And that too using Aktel’s color schemes.)

Add to that the one thing they share with Grandpapa Citycell. They have a shitty tagline.

Citycell: Because we care.

Warid: Be heard.

I mean, I have friends in Warid. I know for a fact that, at least as far as the Dhaka market goes, they have a superior product. Warid uses a different technology from the other GSM providers, has a better SIM card (did you see all those options?). They can upgrade and update their system without massive Aktelesque outages. They’re going to cover the country soon. As far as VAS go, Warid is what the Big Three want to be.

And hello, here’s a new cell phone company in a mature market where companies own cheapness, nationalism, all sorts of things, but nobody tried to position their cell phone brand as technologically superior. Which Warid fucking is to begin with!

The only product which tries to appeal to the tech-savvy is GrameenPhone’s Business Solutions campaign. It’s an incredibly weak campaign. GrameenPhone by its very nature cannot own both technology (unnecessary in their case anyway) as well as “covering every village with love and pride”.

And Warid sits on its ass, waiting and waging petty price-based skirmishes. While cell phone manufacturers, whose high-tech products are essentially useless without the service provider backbone, throw parties at the Radisson and connect the world with music and “the thump”. How could Nokia or Sony-Ericsson, who don’t even have offices in Bangladesh, whose markets and therefore budgets are limited by their product price, battle for a proposition that Warid should own?

Warid bigwigs, I know you guys Google your brand every day, so here’s some free advice. Read up on a bunch of case studies on how markets work and how brands have these things called “positions” which own “qualities” in the consumer’s mind. Look at how the Bangladeshi telecom industry has worked from 2005 onwards. Hell, retake Marketing 101 or—best yet—pay me lots of money to make your strategy for you.

And then, once you’ve done all that, go back to Tajwar Center and shout at your cronies: “We must own technology! Let us own information throughput! Let’s make it easy for the consumer to understand just what the fuck it is we offer because once we make the sale we can keep them!”’

I mean, you'd think they'd save the paisa ads for when the competition starts taking you seriously. And then you can move on to the CONSUMER!!!